


Hope in the air

by sshysmm



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Angst, Angst and Feels, Canon Backstory, F/M, Missing Scene, POV Cassian Andor, Pain, Sharing a Bed, Slow Build, Slow Burn, also the inevitable, but i'm not sure that happened, but mainly, but ultimately within canon, for Jyn and as much for Cassian as anyone can figure out, for warmth ok, i thought i might leave the ending ambiguous, more of an, well not exactly
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-10
Updated: 2017-01-10
Packaged: 2018-09-16 15:18:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 19,135
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9277754
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sshysmm/pseuds/sshysmm
Summary: As someone else on here has said: I don't want to imagine a universe where these two don't get to do it. Or at least to get to know each other better. So I tweaked events on Eadu and shoved in some extra time to give them that chance. A slow-burn from Cassian's POV in which fighting (eventually) becomes something else...





	1. Chapter 1

_Why fear death, be scared of living,_

_our hearts are small and ever thinning._

_There is no hope ever of winning,_

_oh, why fear death, be scared of living._

 

\--

He can see they’re not going to make it to Bodhi’s stolen transport in time. The sky roils with starfighters and the worsening storm, and the unwieldiness of the empty cargo ship is evident in the way it bucks in the winds. The base itself is ready to blow, and Kaytu will no doubt be reciting the lowering odds of Cassian’s escape. He wonders whether Kaytu will also be attempting a strategic analysis of his re-programmer’s irrational dash to save Jyn Erso from the wreckage left by Rebel bombs.

She is stumbling along behind him under her own speed now, but he reaches back occasionally with cold-numbed fingers to grab at her sleeve or shoulder and make sure she keeps going. If they get away before whatever experimental shit is in the lab goes up in flames, he figures they’ll make it to the wreckage of the U-Wing. Maybe that engine didn’t get taken _clean off_ as he remembers, and maybe the damage is in fact fixable. If not, at least he can radio Base One, see whether there are the resources for an extraction. He hopes Kaytu didn’t do too thorough a job of clearing out supplies from the downed ship.

He’s grown so used to the pelting rain by now that it’s disorienting to enter the shelter provided by the U-Wing’s boarding ramp. He and Jyn both pause under the sound of precipitation hammering durasteel to turn and watch the Imperial research facility light up in a ball of orange fire. Ruefully, Cassian thinks how warm it would be up there, before turning and ducking into the belly of the U-Wing.

He’s suddenly acutely aware of her watching him as he fumbles to rip off his sodden gloves and disassemble the rifle into its storage mode. He pauses minutely as he unscrews the viewing scope, wondering whether he needs to keep himself armed. He thinks he can stand by the instinct that told him to let her keep a blaster — way back on Yavin IV — but he senses a crackling in the air, as though she herself is the blaster that might go off at any minute.

“You lied to me.”

Her voice is ice, colder than the trickle of rainwater that has worked its way inside his shirt, trailing along the hollow down his spine. Hesitation in the path of a dangerous animal usually ends poorly, but he knows it’s too late: she saw him flinch. He tries the usual excuse; it works as a brush-off, if nothing else, and in this case, he suspects it’s also true.

“You’re in shock.”

He continues to take off damp outer layers, concentrating on shouldering his way out of the thick overcoat rather than meeting her eyes. That usual excuse — this time, it might have been a mistake.

She sucks an angry breath in, so he abandons defensive tactics and turns on the offense. Finally meeting her stare, he steps towards her: once, with purpose. He knows that an impassive glare and a full foot on his opponent in height will make most combatants think twice.

Jyn barely raises a sneer, however. “You went up there to kill my father.”

He knew she’d guess eventually. He is glad that his skin does not blush easily, or she might see the dirty flush of relief that he feels for not actually having gone through with his orders. He might well be fearing for his life if he’d pulled that trigger. But he’s got to force her to back down somehow: it’s partly the principle of not allowing her this victory; partly it’s a rising frustration he’s been feeling the more he looks at her, or thinks about her. “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he hisses, letting the frustration bubble to the surface.

She stands there, so stiff and still. Her face is the white petal of some deathly, night-blossoming flower, her chin pulled up proud and defiant. “ _Deny_ it,” her tone is sub-zero now, but the adrenaline of the confrontation is beginning to warm him. She’s wanted a fight with _someone_ , _something_ since Jedha (who was he kidding? Since forever, given her file); and Saw Gerrera clearly hadn’t obliged. Fine. Cassian’s never shied from this kind of bruising, personal exchange before. It usually ends with him having fewer people around him to worry about, or to worry over him.

“You went up there to kill my father,” she repeats.

The sheer unwavering _knowing_ in her voice needles, despite his efforts to keep it out. Given the fact that Galen Erso’s body has now been blown sky high by the destruction of the base, it’s striking him as something of a pointless conversation to be having. Sinuously, he moves another step closer, raising his shoulders in a hunch that adds to the impression of his height over hers. “You’re in shock,” he lets his voice soften; sometimes this approach takes all the wind out of an opponent’s sails. “And you’re looking for someplace to put it. I’ve seen it before—“

“I bet you have,” she exhales furiously. Her own shoulders drop back, pushing her chest and chin up towards him. She isn’t the least fazed by the height differential, and their faces are now so close that, beneath the smell of rainwater and mud, he can smell the charred metal and burnt flesh scents that her skin and clothes absorbed on the deck above. “Everyone else on that damned ship knew. You lied about why we came here and you lied about why you went up alone. Alliance starfighters didn’t come to Eadu by _coincidence_.” Her eyes flicker over his face, eager to see whether she is able to drive a spike of hurt or guilt to the surface — as ever, her irises seem dark, yet they’re somehow aglow with something (starlight; the reflections of console leds; a quality altogether more fey and inexplicable…). “Maybe you’ve been lying since the Rebel base. My father was always just a target for you.”

He remembers the casual glance he’d sent over his shoulder during the conversation with Draven back on Yavin IV. She’d been watching as he received the orders to kill her father, but back then she’d been just another troublesome orphan, refusing to take a side in a galaxy that was far too busy tearing itself apart to care about one little girl’s chance at regaining her family. Not least given that said family was the Empire’s top engineer on a secret superweapon. Then he’d seen her nearly leave her own mind in favour of a hologram of her father she had been shown on Jedha, finally returning to herself only to buzz awkwardly with the realisation that Galen Erso didn’t have to be the monster she’d dreamed he was — that he was alive, and trying to undo the bad that had been done.

And Cassian had tried to go through with Draven’s orders, but through the scope of his rifle he’d seen two things: one, that the Empire itself seemed to be less than fond of the scientist, and two, that there was enough of a family resemblance that it would be too much like shooting Jyn. Which is a strange thing to have made him lower the rifle, as most missions began with the acceptance that he might have to dispose of his contact as soon as they became a liability. He doesn’t want to analyse that one. Not yet. But she’s pried the truth from him all right: “I had your father in my sights. I had every chance to pull the trigger.” The _need_ to express this, to make her see that things were _always more complicated_ than they seemed, makes his voice waver with repressed emotion. “But did I?”

No one else is there to answer that question, but she will be able to see that he told the truth. Satisfaction can be read around her eyes: a hit. As she surveys his face — that he knows now exposes more than he’s accustomed to revealing — her lips twist again. She’s going to finish the job. “You might as well have. My father was living proof and you put him at risk. Those were Alliance bombs that killed him!”

How has he lost this one so quickly? She’s a broken waif pulled from an Imperial death sentence, and he knows that the violent death she’d just witnessed _had_ left her in shock; it was what seeing a family member torn apart by flame and shrapnel _just did to you_. Yet her face is still maddeningly serene over its foundation of rage, and he can’t stand it any longer.

“I had orders! Orders that I disobeyed! But you wouldn’t understand that.” _Fight back, Andor. If you can’t win, take her down with you_. He forces a smirk, almost imagines that he can see the cold glint in his eyes reflected in her wide stare.

“Orders? When you know they’re _wrong_? You might as well be a stormtrooper.”

It’s meant to be her final blow, but he feels a surge of triumphant fury. She’s miscalculated. Alright, so she wants to know how it is? Wants to make this about the ethics of the Rebellion, instead of about him lying to her? She’s in no position to lecture him about what’s ‘wrong’, or right — she’s been nothing but a mercenary freeloader for most of her life.

“What do _you_ know? We don’t all have the luxury of deciding when and where we want to care about something.” He draws on the pain of his own memories — usually kept safely away from sight, but if it’ll just get her to see now… “Suddenly the Rebellion is real for you? Now that you’ve got a _stake_ in it, and — _and_ — now that you don’t have another life to go back to?” He needs to tamp back down on that box quickly; the power of his building frustration has brought his hands into fists, and one is now raised nearly parallel with her chin. She eyes it warily, tenses.

Cassian forces the fist back down. He needs her to see that he is in control. This rage he’s unleashing is doing his bidding, it’s not punching out of him unchecked. It’s not wild: it’s aimed. “Some of us _live_ this Rebellion. I’ve been in this fight since I was six years old. You’re not the only one who lost everything.” And with that, he snaps the memories shut, forces them away. His breathing has steadied and he can finally see the certainty, the _knowing_ on her face slip away a little. “Some of us,” he offers a cruel little smirk again, “just decided to do something about it.”

It’s nearly imperceptible, and she doesn’t once break her stare, but she shivers slightly. He can see her skin puckering with goose bumps under the edges of her damp collar. The words she wants to spit are practically legible on her face: _betrayer. Liar. Murderer_.

But the cold tick at the corner of his mouth holds. Let her call him any of those things; he’s heard them often enough that they may as well be the pet names given by a lover.

“You can’t talk your way out of this.”

The words have bravura, but he knows it’s empty. He shrugs. “I don’t have to.”

He waits, inches from her. For once, she is painfully easy to read — he sees he consider ways to hurt him, sees her contemplate using her fists on every inch of his ribcage. He almost licks his lips; almost dares her to do it; even tenses his muscles in preparation for a blow.

But then she grows smaller and the furious light in her eyes dims a little. She spins on her heel and stalks into the ‘fresher at the back of the U-Wing.

If he lets out a growl of rage inside the ship she’ll only get satisfaction from hearing it. So he stalks out into the rain again, nominally to check the engine of the U-Wing. It’s still completely trashed, but one of the rocks that has settled on the surface of the ship is just the right size to go flying under his furious kick. His yell propels it further into the darkening sky as night comes to Eadu; or he thinks it does, but the howling gales and continued, sputtering rain make it hard to tell.

He looks up at the smouldering orange glow where the research facility used to be. If only they’d known about it years ago, he thinks, the trouble they could have nipped in the bud… But then again, there are always going to be brilliant scientists, and where possible, the Empire would always recruit them. And then he thinks of another funeral pyre, made small for a small body, on an icy wasteland where flammable materials were all but a precious resource. And he wishes he were the kind of person who could have helped Jyn grieve her loss, rather than the man she was always going to attach blame to for it.

Cassian sighs at the broken engine. He rummages half-heartedly in the dirt for any salvageable parts, then descends the scree to re-enter the spaceship.

He’s surprised by the level of his own relief when he sees her still on board. She’s sitting on the floor, in the darkest corner, furthest from the cockpit. Her knees are drawn up and her arms loosely wrapped around them. She doesn’t look up, but keeps her numb gaze on the material of her pants. She is sodden, and her fingers look almost blue in the low light of the ship. He presses the door release to bring the hatch closed, and discovers happily that the life-support systems have at least partially survived the crash. They can have some heat.

Leaving her to her space, he goes to the cockpit and ascertains that the alert system on the comms didn’t come back up when Kaytu managed to revive the rest of the functions. They’ve probably missed several attempts at contact from Bodhi’s stolen ship and Base One by now. Cassian returns the frequencies to the right setting and hails the Rebel base.

“Base One responding, good to hear from you again Captain! That’s the second time today we thought we’d lost you.”

He grins with relief at the sound of the friendly voice at the other end of the galaxy. “Can’t get rid of me that easily, Base One.”

“What’s your status, Captain?”

“I’m on the downed U-Wing,” he pauses, his mind flickering through Draven’s likely reactions to what comes next. “I’ve got Jyn with me. The others should be on their way to you in a stolen craft, but we couldn’t get to it in time.”

“Affirmative Captain, we’ve had contact from Kaytu. He sounds even less pleased with his lot than normal…”

Cassian chuckles. “It won’t do him any harm to make some new friends.” His neck prickles; he’s certain that Jyn is looking up now, watching him from the back of the hold. “Any chance of an extraction team from Base One, though? I don’t fancy being here when the scavengers arrive in earnest.”

“Hold on Captain, the General is here. I’ll let him answer you.”

“Captain Andor.” General Draven’s voice is crisp and clear, even through the long-range, scrambled channel. “What’s the mission status?”

He frowns. The X-wings must have reported in already. “Sir? As Blue Leader has told you, I am sure. Target has, um, target was eliminated.”

Draven is silent. No doubt weighing up Cassian’s tone, Blue Leader’s report, and the communication that requested the strike be cancelled because there were friendlies in the line of fire. Cassian knows that this is just a warning of the questions he’ll be faced with when he returns to base. “Just you and the girl still on Eadu?”

“Yes, sir. Just us.”

The silence draws out again. “We’ll send Kaytu back out with Melshi as soon as he returns. Salvage all the parts you can from the U-wing.”

“Sir.”

“And Captain?”

“Sir?”

“Were rebel troops on the platform with the target under your orders?”

It’s been a long day, and he’s not sure his reflexes are quite fast enough that Draven will miss the hint of a pause. “Yes sir.” He’ll answer for it later, but it feels like the right thing to say now.

“I see, Captain. Extract team will despatch on Kay-Tuesso’s return; expect updates from then onwards. Otherwise — keep your heads low and get to stripping out that U-wing.”

“Ah, the chimes on our comm system are down, sir.”

“Very well. It’s late in the part of Eadu you’re down in, am I correct?” The General is, as always, well informed of the details.

“Sir,” Cassian acknowledges.

“Then get yourself a useful amount of sleep. From dawn, call in for updates.”

With a click, the comm goes silent, and Cassian automatically turns the settings away from Rebel frequencies, checking that the databank is as blank of records of the conversation as it should be.

Then he plants his palms wide on the flight console and dips his head with a sigh. This mission has already proved itself to be a hundred times more troublesome than he’d bargained for.

Slowly, it dawns on him that he is frozen to the core. His boots are sodden, wet from the inside out. His hair is still soaked through, drops of water working their way uncomfortably along his scalp and neck. He leaves the cockpit — intending to search for blankets — flickers a glance over at Jyn, and then pauses.

She’s looking up at him, maybe with curiosity, but her gaze is a little blank, and her skin is terrifyingly pale.

“Shit,” he mutters, taking a step towards her, then going to where the emergency gear is stored and praying that Kaytu didn’t empty it all.

“You _are_ in shock,” he adds, tugging a rough woollen blanket free from the locker and moving swiftly to crouch in front of her. Gently, slowly, he lays it over her knees.

She doesn’t move her hands out to take it from him or pull it up; just looks at him with an angry, puzzled expression. So he draws it up further over her, pulling her shoulders forward one by one to tuck it behind her.

It feels inadequate, but it will have to do. The med kit is definitely something he’d told Kaytu to take away to the new ship.

He takes a blanket for himself, removes his jacket and wraps the dry, coarse material around his shoulders instead. “What is this made of, Bantha fur?” he grumbles as he fiddles with the life-support dials, trying to see if there’s a way to build the temperature up. His hands are shaking and his pulse has started to race as he thinks about the blank expression on Jyn’s face.

Circling around the hold again, he eventually decides to return to her side, sliding his back down the bulkhead next to her and hoping that the proximity of body heat might help. For all the warmth he feels in his limbs, at any rate.

“Jyn?”

He can feel her left side through the two blankets: it tensed up the moment he sat down beside her. She says nothing; doesn’t look at him now. Her breath is shallow and rapid.

He has to keep her awake somehow, at least until the worst of this has passed. “Come on. Jyn, talk to me.”

“Go away,” she breathes. “You lied.”

He smiles, maybe more in relief than the rueful one he intends. “Yes. Liar, betrayer, murderer. I know these are my names. But I think we’ve talked about me enough.” He wants to look at her face; see how she responds to his words; see if he can get a spark to light up in those eyes again. But he carefully keeps his gaze on the lump of blanket that covers his knees, trying not to push her. “Tell me about him, Jyn. What do you remember of him?”

There’s a hitch in the sound of her breathing, and he wants to look up; see that she’s ok; but he makes himself stay focused on the fibres of the blanket. For a few seconds, the quiet is deep enough that he can hear the storm outside the thickened hull. Then she begins to speak: slowly, with effort at first, but growing into something a little stronger, pulling herself out of whatever place she’d retreated to.

“He was my father. He … he was always kind. Gentle and soft-spoken. He used to bring me toys, especially when he got home late from the lab. Ma— my _mother_ would tell him that I’d gone to bed, but he’d always persuade her, say that if I turned out to be awake anyway it was no harm, and if I was asleep it would wait until morning. He’d sneak into my room with the toy, desperately hoping I was awake. And I always was. He’d help me name them, and decide on their backstories, so that I could go to sleep ready for them to join in with the other toys first thing the next day.”

Something keeps tightening and loosening in Cassian’s chest as he follows her voice. He thinks whatever it is might take his breath completely from him when he hears her smile around the next words. “I think he missed one of them that got left behind on Coruscant more than I did.”

They’re quiet for a bit, but she shifts a little next to him, rearranging the corners of her own blanket so that it covers her better. She leans her head back on the bulkhead, and he finally glances over. The white line of her neck rises up, lit by the consoles in the ship, and it makes that _tightness_ in his chest squeeze again.

“He was a terrible farmer,” she says suddenly, flatly, but there’s an amused crinkle at the corner of the eye he can see. “I think we’d have bloody starved on Lah’mu if my mother hadn’t had some experience with botany. He was always scribbling in books on Coruscant, but never there. He was restless instead; brooded over data consoles that he kept in a hidden alcove he thought I didn’t know about. I think he always felt a little lost on Lah’mu. But he was a good father.”

 _Until he abandoned me_.

She doesn’t need to say the last bit out loud for him to understand that it’s there.

He sees her neck move as she gulps down before speaking again. He notes the wet sheen on her eyes and looks away out of respect.

“He wanted to think I was happy. He was just an old man, who loved me, I think. No, I think now I _know_.” She tries to chuckle at the contrariness of her words, but it’s a wet, strangled sound that dies before it’s quite out of her throat. “Do you know what he said, right before he died?”

Cassian is silent. It’s not a question he’s meant to answer, and he fixes his gaze on his knees again.

“He said he ‘had so much to tell me’. And then he kriffing _died_.”

He thinks the next words she was going to force out were along the lines of _selfish bastard_ , but they don’t survive beyond a wavering ‘s’, escaping between her teeth.

Her body shakes a little next to him, but he doesn’t move. The last time he offered someone comfort wasn’t too long ago; it just happened to be when he’d wanted Tivik to die calmly and quietly. That register makes him feel like an angel of death, not like someone who could really share in the other’s emotions. He uses comfort when he wants something, generally.

She stops crying shortly though, and he thinks — hopes — that maybe she appreciated his silence more than any platitudes.

He’s still cold, and still damp, and so’s she, but at least now the shock seems to have faded. Her breathing is normal and a pinch of colour has returned to her skin. Soon she drops off to sleep; quietly and without ceremony or fidgeting. Her chin just drops to her chest and she sleeps the sleep of one who’s used to catnapping wherever and whenever she can.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Cassian and Jyn miss their ride off Eadu. They're both soaked to the skin and she's in shock, so there's only one logical outcome, right?

When he wakes up, _freezing_ doesn’t even begin to cover it — and he grew up on an ice planet, for Force’s sake. He lets out a groan and forces his stiff back away from the bulkhead, tottering to his feet.

“Augh!” He immediately regrets it. Everything is still wet, and his toes squelch in sodden socks.

Jyn flinches awake at his sound of discomfort, her head snapping up and hands tightening their grip on her blanket. “What the kriff?” she complains.

“Sorry,” Cassian shrugs, dropping his blanket on the floor and taking a few paces away from it before he starts to work on his bootlaces.

“Oh, you’re not. You don’t take boots off in a space this small that _others_ have to share,” she watches in horror, eyes round above the blanket as she raises it to cover her nose and mouth. “Cassian, I swear, I didn’t hit you earlier when you bloody deserved it, but I will now if you do that.”

He shoots her a quizzical look. From furious arguments to childhood memories to soldierly banter, all within no more than a couple of hours? She keeps him reeling.

“My feet are perfectly clean!” he protests, continuing with the laces as she glares at him. “Do you want to know how I know this?”

She pulls the blanket to her face again as he starts to haul the first boot off. “No…” she warns.

The boot pulls off slowly, actually kind of painfully given how swollen the skin of his foot now is. With a sucking sound, the shoe comes free, bringing half of his sock with it. The toe of the sock lands with a wet slap on the deck and Jyn groans in disgust.

Cassian pulls the sock off, eyeing her. He holds it out, so she can see it drip. “See? Clean feet.”

“Ugh,” she responds. “Wring it out far away from me. And don’t get your blanket wet, you’re not sharing mine if you get that one soaked.”

Ah, she must have been the pragmatist in Saw’s cell, he thinks to himself, chuckling as he limps one-booted over to the vents at the edge of the deck. He’s not sure what good it’ll be, but he wrings the sock out and lays it over the warmed durasteel. Having done the same with his other boot and sock he wonders what to do about the rest of his clothes.

Jyn is still curled by the bulkhead, watching his every move and wrinkling her nose in good-natured disgust. Slowly, like she’s reluctant to admit hers are as bad, she extends her legs from under the blanket and begins pulling at the laces.

Soon they’re both standing barefooted, surveying the puddles on the floor.

“Is there a … bunk? Bunks? Anything of that kind on board this kriffing thing?” Jyn asks, surveying the hold with the same ruthlessness she’d had when she first stepped aboard.

Cassian flicks a lock open and presses a button — a hard medical cot slides out of the wall. It’s made of the same durasteel as the ship, and is just about wide enough to strap an injured body to. “This. And there’s a pilot’s hammock in the cockpit.”

Jyn pulls a face. “I’ve slept on worse,” she says, approaching the cot.

“No, you take the hammock.”

She looks at him. “What, coming over all gentlemanly now you’ve told me you disobeyed orders and didn’t _really_ want to kill my father?”

Ah, it wasn’t really forgiveness then, just a temporary respite. He feels more like he’s on firm ground, but it’s oddly disappointing nonetheless. He shouldn’t need, or want, her forgiveness anyway. So he shrugs and makes an exasperated sound, like he knows he _can’t win_ however he answers her.

But she’s smirking a little, watching him squirm. “Cassian, don’t they train you field agents in the best way to keep warm when the body’s spent a period in cold, damp clothing?”

He meets her playful expression coolly. “Shove them in the carcass of a recently dead ewok, or similar, is one I’ve seen used.”

“What?” It’s a sound somewhere between a shriek and a whisper. “Ew, what? What in the galaxy have you been doing for the Rebellion?” Her forehead is crumpled with an incredulous frown and her lips are slightly agape.

He can’t quite keep the serious expression, though he tries hard. Her look of disbelief is too much — “what, dead ewoks are worse than me maybe having been ordered to kill your father now?” Before she can give an answer, he barrels on — yet again the best defence turning out to be some personal detail he’d not normally dream of sharing with a contact, or even a casual acquaintance. “I grew up on Fest — there’s not much there other than snow, ewoks, constant war, and more snow.”

She shoots a sideward _look_ at his sheepish grin; the look is somewhere between reproach, respect, and genuine amusement.

“Well, as we’re clean out of _small furry corpses_ ,” she glares at him again. “I suggest the alternative method — get rid of as many wet clothes as possible and make the best of body heat and dry bedding.”

Again, he’s glad that his skin doesn’t really redden with blushes, and manages to meet her eyes with a measure of nonchalance. Of course it’s the logical thing to do. It will let their clothes dry; they can share the more comfortable hammock and both be better rested; and he’s done the same plenty of times as a kid in dug-out ice shelters lined with plast and furs.

Whilst he’s still trying to process his own reaction to the only evident way of getting dry and warm, Jyn begins to lose her layers. Neatly, professionally, she lays her jacket flat over the weak vents, removes belts and pouches and leaves the leather further from the heat source. She has to brace herself against the bulkhead to haul off the wet pants, but does so as deftly as she can, and lays them carefully by her jacket.

“Cassian, if you’re going to stare, I’ll make you sleep on the cot after all,” she calls, wriggling her clinging shirt up over her head.

He blinks and gets to work on his belt and pants fastenings, following up with his shirt.

In nothing but vest, underwear and a clear crystal necklace, Jyn prowls past him towards the cockpit.

“No staring goes both ways,” he complains, not turning around as he feels her gaze on his back.

He hears a throaty chuckle disappear into the cockpit as he frees his wet shirt from his wet back. _This is a terrible idea_ , he reflects, but moves with a lightness of step towards the small, dark space at the front of the ship.

Jyn has found the hammock and is affixing the far end above the pilot’s seat. She has to stand up on tiptoes and reach to get it on its hook, but Cassian doesn’t offer to help. “Well go on then, fetch the blankets,” she urges, her teeth beginning to chatter.

When he returns, she’s standing waiting on the opposite side of it. They lay one blanket as evenly as they can in the bottom of the hammock and then he steadies it as she clambers in, stepping off the co-pilot’s chair and its headrest. For a weird, wild moment, he thinks of the ewok wedding ceremonies on Fest, and nearly laughs out loud.

She gives him another uncomprehending look: “oh, I’d like to see you get up here with your dignity intact, thank you very much.”

“I cast no aspersions on your dignity,” he smirks, reaching up to the handles on the ceiling of the cockpit to pull himself off the floor.

Doing a pull-up in nothing but your underwear, whilst trying to climb into a swaying hammock that’s already occupied — well, let’s just say he’s not felt this exposed since his cover was blown on Tatooine.

Jyn’s not laughing at him though, and he feels a burst of utterly irrational, useless satisfaction at her look of … astonishment? Something overlaying a distant, grumbling hunger, anyway.

He pulls the second blanket up over them, their bodies immediately sliding down to the centre of the hammock as he settles. There’s no way not to feel skin on skin, but beneath their icy exteriors he can feel heat beginning to burn back up to the surface. They both lie as still as they can, and he can hear (or can he just feel?) her breath as she tries to slow it down; keep it calm. Maybe she’s also thinking this was a bad idea. But the warmth that is already spreading between them is intoxicating, and he’s not about to volunteer to head over to the cold steel cot again.

“Okay?” he checks. If it’s not, he’ll just have to get out and go back, like it or not.

She nods. “Yeah. Stars, these blankets are rough.”

“At first I guessed Bantha hair, but I’m revising that estimate to ‘shredded mynock,’” he agrees.

“Still, not as bad as your thigh,” she says it like it’s drawn from her, almost like she can’t help herself.

He tries to sink into his patch of hammock, to anchor himself in a way that won’t make them lean together so hard. “No, that’s just the blanket,” he hisses. Her nervous energy is making him focus on areas of his body — and hers — that he’d rather avoid thinking about being in such proximity.

She takes a breath, as though she’s going to counter with something else, but manages to bite it back.

He keeps trying to close his eyes, but cracks them open out of curiosity. _Kriff, if she’s blushing I don’t want to know_. He squeezes his eyes shut again.

“Sleep well, Jyn,” he says roughly.

“Yeah, you too.”

She sounds about as comfortable as he feels, but eventually the heat has the necessary effect, and both of them drift off into a deeper sleep than they’d enjoyed earlier.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> They just look so uncomfortable and wet in the movie and I thought: wouldn't it be nice if they got to take their clothes off and share a hammock for a bit?


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Right, moving on from that brief, fluffy interlude about disgusting wet socks and ewok death, back to the angst. Cassian's backstory.

Like the dust that must have finally come to settle on Jedha, their bodies have settled together in a new formation during sleep. In the bottom of the hammock he lies on his side, with her body curved back against his. His right arm is under her neck, and her left hand holds his other arm in its loose embrace of her waist.

The comfortable warmth that first seeps over him when he wakes up is soon dashed by a pulse-quickening vulnerability. Sharing quarters isn’t meant to be like this; these aren’t lines that his body finds naturally, especially not when it’s a near-stranger he’s bunked with. His beard and unkempt stubble are catching in her chestnut hair — the smell of burning that still clings to her is about the only familiar thing to him in the whole situation.

An automatic reaction is welling up in him to the softness of her body pressing against his, and he tenses, trying to gauge whether he can extract himself from this position without sending the hammock jolting and swaying. It seems unlikely, but he’d prefer it if she wakes up because she thinks he’s shifted abruptly in his sleep, than if she wakes up at the feeling of his cock insistently prodding the small of her back.

Unceremoniously, he retracts his arms and flips himself so that his back is now against hers. Gravity lets his body climb the side of the hammock for only a moment before dragging his skin back into touch with her. A chill breeze seems to ruffle over his flesh, and he shoulders into the blanket, gripping its corner to his chest; concentrating again on the rough material in an effort to take his mind off the way she’s adjusting up against him.

He doesn’t think she’s fully woken though, and manages to close his eyes. He’s not sure if the nights on Eadu are particularly long, or if he’s just struggling through normal time as though it’s quicksand. He tries to settle himself by going over the information he’s been gathering related to the superweapon they’re hunting (or is it hunting them, after Jedha?), but each snippet seems to come with a reproachful ghost attached to it now; Tivik’s last whimper melding with Jyn’s screams as he’d dragged her away from her father’s corpse.

“Cassian.”

Her voice takes him completely by surprise, and there’s no way she can’t feel him twitch at the sound.

“Sorry, I didn’t think you were asleep.”

“It’s okay. I’m not.”

She lets out a long breath, and he clamps his teeth down on his bottom lip, trying not to imagine what that hot breath might feel like on his skin, if they had both been facing the other way in the hammock. “What happened when you were six?”

The question jolts him almost as much as her murmuring his name had. His eyes are now wide awake, and he waits, back starting to ache with the tension that’s locked into his shoulders.

“You said you joined the Rebellion. What happened?” she asks again. Her voice is soft, with only the gentlest hint of coaxing behind it. If there had been any hint of a demand, of the expectation of something in return for her own stories, he would have shut it out. But the tone is simple; it doesn’t read like an exchange of intelligence, just the curiosity of someone else who had found themselves thrust into a life of turmoil from a young age.

His shoulders relax a bit, and she shuffles her back against him comfortably as they do so. But he’s not sure where to start: his acquired understanding of the situation on his home planet overlays the confusion of his childhood memories. Fest is occupation overlaid with civil war, overlaid with rebellion, overlaid with Imperial loyalty, overlaid with resistance. He grasps for the end of a thread of a memory, a beginning or an end of something that she might understand.

“I was four or five when Separatists set up a mining and research base at the head of our valley. They were at it all over the Outer Rim, looking for research projects to hijack; left behind planets that would respond to bribery and flattery.” He pauses, feeling a tweak in Jyn’s shoulder against his back.

She accepts his silent invitation quietly. “Yes. I was actually born on Vallt. Though I don’t remember it.”

The coincidence makes him shiver like, what was it people sometimes said back on Base One? Like a Jedi’s ghost has passed through you? Another child soldier born on a backward ice planet, orphaned and outrunning the exploitation of the galaxy since memories began; and she was pressed, her back to his back, in this scenario of his own making, because he’d seen _something_ about her that he couldn’t bear to leave in the ruins of Jedha. He sighs, tries to recover the thread of memory.

“Well, we resisted. Local transporters lost Separatist cargoes in snow drifts, or found their engines were too cold to operate when the Separatists needed transport to the spaceport or the research base. I don’t really know what my parents’ jobs were. I can’t think of my father as ever having been anything but an insurrectionist. But by the time I was six, the Separatists had learnt to be callous and petty with the locals, and their operations were expanding. The Republic must have decided that the base was enough of a threat, and tried to liaise with local resistance groups at first, but they didn’t get any more sympathy from my father’s people than the Separatists did. So, they took matters into their own hands and sent in troops to destroy the facility.

“Clone troopers are remembered for their precision; but that’s not what I saw from them.”

His breathing has grown deeper, his eyes unfocussed as he thinks back to the day he first saw snow turn into fire and death. “My brother and I were with some other local children. We were meant to provide a brief distraction for the Separatist patrols, so that my father’s unit could swipe supplies as they were delivered. But the …” he swallows the next word, “… _mission_ , coincided with the troopers’ attack. It was risky being the distraction anyway, but the Separatists didn’t want to provoke the natives too much, so they’d usually just shoot back on stun, or fire into the snow around us. When AT-ATs attacked the Separatist patrol before we could, we found ourselves throwing stones and bottles at armoured troopers instead of bored, demoralised Separatist guards.”

He can hear Jyn swallow, feel the nervous understanding ripple down her back.

“AT-ATs aren’t known for having much of a ‘stun’ mode,” she murmurs.

He manages a dry, almost grateful growl of amusement. “No. By the end of the day we were scavenging what we could to give my brother a funeral pyre. One that my father said would ‘burn with a fury seen all the way from the Unknown Territories to the Core Worlds’. We never found my mother’s body, nor those of so many others. The troopers just did their job on the base, and razed everything in the area; a warning to other worlds and so-called ‘collaborators.’”

It wasn’t an unusual story, he reflected, but it was personal, and it felt oddly good to remember the catalyst for why he now did what he did for Draven and the others.

“From then on, we travelled from world to world in the Outer Rim, hitching lifts with smugglers and stowing away on whatever cargo vessels were going where we needed. We built up allies on multiple worlds, made contacts within the young Rebellion. My father was driven by the memory of the troopers’ behaviour on Fest, and when the Republic pushed for more and more military powers, he became single-minded.”

He wonders whether she was expecting more emotion in the telling, but it all feels so long ago, so distant, that he’s not really sure how to access those emotions. “Force knows what he thought he’d achieve on Carida, but he did succeed very effectively in getting himself mown down by the proto-Empire’s most elite new forces.”

Jyn shuffles again in the silence. “How did you get off Carida?”

Cassian gives a snort and a shake of his head. “I wasn’t on Carida. He must have known it was a stupid idea, and left me in charge of scoping out a base on Mygeeto.”

He can almost _feel_ her mind flicking through all the new information, her body thrumming behind him like a databank hard at work. “You didn’t see either of them die? Your parents?”

“I saw the explosion that killed my mother. But my brother had already died; I was in shock, and I don’t remember the details of the day well.”

Jyn sighs. “I only remember my mother’s death in my dreams. It never seems quite real when I’m awake.”

There’s no need to respond to that; he knows precisely what she means.

The tension of sharing the hammock has lessened somewhat. He’s a little annoyed by how effective a catharsis the talking has been, but on the other hand, he now feels confident enough to roll onto his back next to her, looking up at the cockpit ceiling. He’s trying to work out what he feels, sharing this space with the only person in the galaxy he’s ever described those years to outside of an intelligence debriefing.

She shifts to find the same position, and seemingly without either of them initiating it, their hands find each other, pressed between their hips in the centre of the hammock. The moment stretches, and he imagines all that is suddenly possible: he might reach up his free hand, the left one, lean towards her and cup her cheek with that hand. He might move the thumb on his right hand, stroking the chapped skin of her own digit. Maybe she would have her eyes open; maybe they’d close peacefully at his touch. Maybe he’d check that she was no longer cold, plant a kiss on her forehead; or maybe he’d go straight to her mouth, pressing out its creases and softening the hard line it so often adopts.

Even as he’s imagining these futures he’s furiously telling himself that this can’t be real feeling, that it’s just the loosely forged intimacy of having given away some information about himself. It really _seems_ real, there in the dark, silent cockpit of the U-wing though. But then what would he know? The most meaningful relationship he’s ever had has been with a droid he’d reprogrammed himself.

He’s made the occasional attempt, to be sure; but there never seemed much point when he didn’t know what planet he’d be on, or how he’d get there, from week to week. As a teenager, he might occasionally have dreamt of a woman — or a man — with a ship, someone who could offer a regular, comforting presence without interrupting the, by then natural, routine of moving constantly. And there had been one short-lived (literally) moment since he’d joined the Rebellion when he’d thought seriously about the pleasures of spending time with another person. In between these listless efforts, he’s made the odd foray to the corners of the Outer Rim where anything goes, but since a blazing row with a fellow insurrectionist (he’d started to think them seedy, sad, places populated only by the refugees of the Empire who couldn’t eke out a better living elsewhere; his comrade had disagreed) he’s only ever been in them for the purposes of getting information.

And, like the comforting words he’d offered Tivik, sex had just been a physical exchange of wants or needs; a rumour for a rumour; a secret for a secret; but always try to take more than you give away.

Over the moment of calm almost as soon as he’d settled into it, he fearfully tries to extract his hand from Jyn’s. At first her fingers loosen, and then to his surprise her grip redoubles. He glances across, but she doesn’t look at him, and her expression is masked totally.

“Do you despise me?” she whispers.

He feels like the hammock’s been swept away from under him, blinks and gapes for a second, trying to find the words to reply. “What? No!” The fervour that comes through is stronger than he’d intended, but if he’d expected a particular reaction, it was most certainly not the one he received.

“Oh.” Her eyes widen a fraction at the ceiling, and then the corners of her mouth turn down and she clamps her lips tight again. She lets go of his hand and rolls away again; and again the hammock draws her body down into his gravity, so that he has to turn away on his side too in order to stop her rolling onto him.

He eventually slips back into sleep, but his thoughts flutter and refuse to settle. He thinks of faces from all his different pasts; faces that he couldn’t begin to put a name to; maybe he never even knew their names. He’s not sure if they were lovers or victims, or something more banal than either. He’s left them all behind, but in his dreams, as he tries to move on beyond the faces, he’s eventually tracked down by something (or _someone_ ) composed of pure starlight (or the pure blackness of space), and although he tells them he has nothing to explain, they beat every inch of him with fists of pure light (or dark) for whatever it is he’s done, and he gasps for breath in the dream, and he knows he deserves this.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry universe, you'll have to pry bi-Cassian and bi-Jyn out of my cold, dead headcanon. Everyone gets to love the beautiful space orphans with messed up attitudes towards intimacy.


	4. Chapter 4

In Eadu’s blue dawn Cassian wakes up feeling something between resentment and relief. His body has sprawled in his sleep again, and he swiftly retrieves the hand that had flopped behind his back to grasp Jyn’s uppermost knee.

She wakes with a gasp at the movement, and props herself up on her right elbow, sending the hammock swaying. “What is it?”

“Nothing,” he tries to steady the hammock with a tight grip on its edge, leaning around a little to catch a glimpse of her. “I need to get up and comm Base One for an update on our extraction.”

“Oh, we’re getting an extraction?” Jyn half turns. Her hair is nominally still in its bun, but more of it seems to be out than in now. Her outline is soft in front of the light from the viewport, but her words are spiky again. “I thought I was just going to die in this bloody hammock with you.”

Right — a reset, just like when they’d woken up damp and shivering in the hold. She’d gone to sleep with something bared, and by the time she woke up she was going to act like it had never happened. That suited Cassian fine.

“I’m getting up first, you stay there ‘til I’m out,” he instructs, and she tuts; probably more at his tone than because of an actual desire to move first. He throws the blanket back and sits up, scanning the ceiling again for the hand grips.

Jyn obligingly tries to balance his weight as he shifts to lift his legs over the edge of the material. Hoisting himself by tired shoulders and arms, he clears his weight from the hammock gently and Jyn rolls into the centre of the bedding. She peers at the chairs that she’d used to climb up there and huffs at the design of the cockpit. “You’d think all the pilots in the galaxy were kriffing Ithorians,” she grumbles, coming to her knees on the swaying cloth.

Trying to distract himself from the way the muscles in her thighs tense to keep her balanced, Cassian holds the edge of the hammock. “Why don’t you use the hand holds? It’s not like they’re out of reach now you’re already up there.”

She glances up, and her hands follow her gaze almost immediately. He steps back as her arms flex, and he catches glimpses of old scars glint on her skin in the light of the dawn. Deftly, she pulls her legs up and out of the hammock, lowering first them, and then straightening her arms down until her toes dangle only a few inches from the deck. She releases and lands with a practiced quiet, shoots him a look that is maybe nothing; maybe a challenge of some kind; and then she stalks from the cockpit to check on her drying clothes.

Cassian follows at last, still a little dazed by her languid, muscular movements. She’s already got her pants back on, the material clearly stiff and scratchy after the heavy rain and flat drying on the vents.

He lifts his own pants and grimaces as he tries to shake out the dried dirt and grit coating their legs. As he’s bending to retrieve his shirt, there’s a warm touch at his back; so slight that for a moment he almost thinks it’s a wound that’s re-opened, hot blood on his skin. But his questing fingers meet her retreating ones momentarily when he reaches back, and he flinches forward, turning to see what she’s after.

The question is in his eyes, he doesn’t need to say it out loud. But Jyn just wears a little frown, she looks curious but not deadly; nor does she look like someone who’d been planning a stealth seduction whilst his back was turned.

“That was a close miss,” she mutters, her eyes not on his face, as though she’s still able to see his back even though he’s facing her full on now, shirt still in his hand.

He reaches back again and feels the long bump of a scar between the bones of his ribcage. With a grunt and a flick of one eyebrow, he meets her gaze, starts to replace his shirt; lets her wait if she wants an elaboration on it.

“I’m more careful with my contacts these days,” he eyes her as he tucks the shirt in. “And Force be thanked for bacta tanks.”

She nods, a thoughtful expression on her face. “Vibroblade?”

“Yeah — though it felt like a vibromachete at the time,” he smiles, almost enjoying this aspect of her curiosity.

“Tell me about it,” Jyn mutters, starting to turn towards her belts, pouches and gloves.

Cassian shucks on his jacket. “We’ll have to compare notes sometime,” he murmurs, the words out before he’s quite thought about them.

She shoots a little glance, and almost a smirk over the shoulder though. “Fat chance. I know guys whinge more about their injuries, and I’ve heard all those stories before.”

By the time he’s put away the hammock and tuned in to the Rebel frequencies on the comm again, he finds himself glowing from some strange star that seems to have lodged itself in his chest. He still has something like a smile on his face, and there are fewer aches in his muscles than there have been for a while. He’s not worried; a short chat with Draven is bound to fix the unnatural _lightness_ he’s suffering from.

“Good morning, I take it, Captain?” the sour response comes to his hailing call.

“Sir, it is dawn on Eadu, yes. Calling for updates on extraction, as ordered, sir.”

“We’re despatching a ship within the next click. Expect them from between four and five clicks from now. Kaytu knows where he’s leading them. In the meantime, get all equipment and cabling you can out of the U-wing — the Rebellion needs it more than any scavengers.”

“Of course, sir.”

“Anything else to report, Andor?”

Cassian frowns. Jyn is standing next to him in the cockpit, and shrugs at his confused look.

“No, sir?”

“Good. Debriefing will commence as soon as you return to Base One. We’ll debrief the girl afterwards.”

Jyn pulls a face full of revulsion at being referred to as ‘the girl’, but this time Cassian manages to keep the smirk out of his voice as he signs off.

“ _He’s_ the one who gave you the orders,” she states, arms folded and face fixed with an expression like she’s just inhaled too close to the wrong end of a Hutt.

“General Draven is my superior, and he recruited me into the Rebellion. Without him, I’d probably have already died doing something as stupid as my father,” he points out, looming over her just a little as he passes back into the hold.

“Sure, why settle when you could die doing something far stupider,” she snorts, but he senses it’s more for the sake of getting the final word than because she’s actually invested in the conversation.

Once he tells her what needs stripping out of the ship she turns into an eager and capable worker. He’d thought it might be a stretch for two people to decommission a whole U-wing in a matter of hours, but when he sees her grease-stained arms hauling cables out of panelling with the determination of a starving akk dog, he figures he might not have to disappoint Draven this time.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Return to Yavin IV plus debrief.

When Melshi and the others finally turn up, they find Cassian and Jyn sitting on a pile of the U-wing’s vital innards, basking in the cold, weak sun of Eadu, and brandishing blasters at the corpses of a couple of scavengers who were stupid enough to try to spread their operations beyond the still smouldering research facility.

Melshi gives Cassian a vast grin and claps him on the shoulder; he gives Jyn a wide berth and a wary look, however.

Cassian chuckles at it. “Don’t worry, Melshi, she’s okay with being rescued by you this time.”

The marine rubs the back of his head, clearly remembering the blow he’d received from a shovel wielded by Jyn only a few days ago. “You okay, Captain?” he ducks his head, the question for Cassian alone. “Does she know?”

Cassian glances at her and turns Melshi by the elbow, leading him a few steps away. “She knows. We’ve talked. It’s … not _fine_ , I don’t think, but she’ll come through it.”

The other man narrows his eyes and studies the intelligence operative. “Really? We thought you’d have to tie her up, for sure. Some of the team weren’t even sure _that_ would save your life.”

He gives Melshi another small smile. “I’ll have to get the names of these doubters from you.”

Melshi barks a laugh. “Well, seeing as you’re back at base _so often_ , you can just buy me a few rounds and see what I happen to blurt out.”

They chuckle good-naturedly and return to the landing ramp of the transport piloted by Kaytu. Everything’s loaded up, and even Jyn is already on board, recognising the whispers and looks of the Pathfinders on board. She arcs an eyebrow and squares her shoulders, responding with a fierce look in order to reinforce the memories of those who have already been on the receiving end of her fists.

Cassian smiles at the scene; she’s relishing this reputation. But he hides the smile quickly when he catches Melshi giving him a … look. A look full of questions; the kind of look that he knows, if gone unanswered, will spawn a thousand rumours on the Rebel base before his second boot touches the soil of Yavin IV. Trying to turn it into a shrug, he lopes into the cockpit to greet Kaytu.

“I am gratified and — _surprised_ to see you, Cassian,” the droid says.

“Oh?”

“Yes. Odds of Jyn Erso terminating you following the elimination of her father were … high.” Kaytu turns to him on the last word; if a droid could give withering glances, Cassian would have been on the receiving end of one.

“What, you’re one of the ones who thought I wouldn’t be able to take care of myself?” Cassian injects indignation into his tone.

Kaytu gives him that same over-the-shoulder look, its optical sensors scanning him up and down. “Experience indicates that you have been able to take care of yourself approximately forty—“

“Okay, okay, no need for the percentages, thanks Kaytu,” Cassian smiles, slipping into the co-pilot’s seat beside the droid. He runs his hands over the controls, enjoying the sensation of being on the move again.

He glances back at the belly of the transport. “Everyone secured for hyperspace?”

A chorus of ‘ayes’ returns through the hatch, and like the experienced team they are, he and Kaytu flip switches and pull levers, and soon they’re launching into the flickering blue glow of faster than light travel.

He darts a second glace back. Jyn’s head is bowed, and she’s fiddling with her fingernails, but she’s speaking to one of the Rebels at the back of the transport, a Bothan woman, who listens with wide eyes, interjects with a conspiratorial hiss, and then urges Jyn to keep talking.

By the time they emerge from hyperspace at Yavin, the whole ship is a-buzz with the news she’s brought of the planet-killer and the secret to its destruction. The hold seems brighter than it had back on Eadu: Cassian sees something new blazing in the eyes of the Pathfinders on board. _Hope_. _Purpose_. The job that will make everything else worthwhile.

For her part, he’s not sure Jyn is enjoying their admiring glances so much as she’d enjoyed their fear and distrust when they’d boarded. He frowns back at her; a small figure trying to make herself smaller in a seat at the back of the transport. _Do you despise me?_

“Traditionally, the co-pilot assists with the landing of the vessel,” Kaytu’s voice prompts him to turn around.

He can feel the droid’s optical sensors (and no doubt whatever other sensors Kaytu deems relevant to the situation) scanning him as he checks their path to orbit and turns the comms to the right frequency to hail the base.

“Cassian. You _believe_ her. About the plans and about her father.”

He nods, transmitting their course to the base with a flick of a switch. He doesn’t look at Kaytu, but the movement of his head is forceful, matching his voice when he finally speaks. “I do. I have since Jedha, when she told us about the message.”

Kaytu whirrs and clicks. “Given that she has not attempted to kill you yet…” it reasons.

Cassian looks up at the droid, nods again, once, encouragingly. “Kaytu, are you about to admit that you’ve maybe not quite got the full range of human interactions figured out?”

Kaytu straightens its chassis; he can practically hear the huff of indignation. “If I fail to fully grasp the manifold minute irrationalities of the human condition, then I have only my programmer to blame.”

 _Ah, that old excuse_. He smirks, but lets Kaytu have the final word.

The ship arcs around the gas giant Yavin, and they begin their descent to the surface of its fourth moon.

 

...

 

“So. You went back on Jedha to make sure Erso wasn’t left behind.” Draven doesn’t need to make it a question.

“Yes sir. She’d been in a private meeting with Saw since we arrived on his base, and I thought she could have important information.”

“But you had the pilot. The defector alluded to.”

“Yes. But … I suspected that something had been done to him. Some form of torture? He seemed vague and confused when we first encountered him. The information he’d brought might not have been intact.”

Draven grunts. “We’ve managed to ascertain that Saw was using a bor gullet on his captives. It seems his paranoia had become completely unmanageable. Rook is very lucky to have come out as well as he has.”

“That makes sense,” Cassian nods, thinking of the pilot’s wild, haunted look. He’s heard about these creatures; shudders at the thought of all he’s ever done or seen being raked through and shredded up by such a consciousness as the bor gullet’s.

“So you didn’t rescue Erso because you believed she was also being subjected to the same torture?”

At this, Cassian frowns. “Sir? With respect, is this a psych eval, or a debrief? I believed she was still necessary, and the danger of rescuing her was not so great that—“

“Thank you, Captain, you stand by your judgement then. It has always been impeccable,” Draven looks up as he says _always_ , trying to make Cassian doubt himself now. He knows these games; Draven taught him most of them.

“And then she told you about a message recorded by her father. But she had no physical proof of this message. And you rerouted to Eadu.”

“Yes sir, as per your orders.”

“…with a ship now also containing two Guardians of the Whills.”

Cassian moves awkwardly in his seat. “I, um. I believed them to be potential assets, and likely Rebel defectors.”

Draven simply bestows a glare on him at this. Cassian can see that Draven thinks he’s found a loose thread, and he’s going to pull on it until Cassian admits to a mistake, or reveals something that could give Draven an excuse for grounding him; or, more likely, imprisoning Jyn (who Draven has never trusted), or any of the others.

“And on Eadu there were troops on the platform with the target — under your orders, as you relayed from the U-wing — correct?”

“Sir.” How far can he maintain that lie?

“Who was on the platform?”

Draven will already have debriefed Kaytu, and interviewed Bodhi, Chirrut and Baze. There’s not going to be any hiding from this for much longer.

“Just … Erso.” He swallows her first name.

Draven cocks his head. He’s not a cruel man by nature; he just knows precisely how to read a shoddy story, and how to get information out of people. It’s why he’s Cassian’s superior officer, after all. “Erso. Not just Galen Erso, who you had orders to take out?”

“No. His daughter was there when the strike began.”

“And did she know about the orders you had received from me?”

 _Well, this is only going to get more awkward_ … “Not to my knowledge. Not at that point.”

“And did any of the other crew?”

“No.”

“And did you have a clear shot of Galen Erso before the strike?”

Cassian looks up to study Draven’s face. What had the others already told him? He thought that he might have trusted to the natural suspicion of Baze, and Chirrut’s evident tact; that they might not have said much about what they knew of his actions. Likewise with Bodhi, who had found his faith in the Rebellion shaken before it had really had a chance to take form. But Kaytu… he would have said what he’d seen. It was just the way he was.

And that was one reason why Cassian had ordered the droid to stay back at the ship and unload it. “No sir. There were others on the platform, they seemed to be preparing for an important arrival. Erso was masked by other figures and by the structures on the platform.”

“I see. And why did you order his daughter to go to the platform alone?”

 _Shit_.

“I … I worried that I wouldn’t have a shot. And thought she could infiltrate the base if necessary, or steal a trooper’s access card. I had her covered with my rifle from where I was.”

Draven nods, and almost smiles. He’s proud of Cassian, but there’s a tangle in this mission that’s of Cassian’s own doing and Draven can sense it — but Cassian wants to be the first to figure it out, not Draven.

“So Erso — _Galen_ Erso — was killed by the first bombing run. And, I understand, you and Jyn Erso missed the transport off Eadu because you had gone to the platform to … rescue her?” the near-invisible, blonde eyebrows are raised now. Cassian follows the furrows they make up Draven’s lengthening forehead, and is struck by how much the man looks like a Bith.

“She was still the only person to have seen Galen Erso’s message.”

“Hm. Quite. And you believe what she says about its content?”

“More than ever.” Cassian’s getting tired of going ‘round this question. His voice is fierce and rough, and he presses his fingers to the arms of his chair so that Draven doesn’t see them shiver as he spits the words out.

Draven’s eyebrows drop as quickly as they’d raised. “Captain, I must impress upon you the ramifications that this information could have. Are you _certain_ that your judgement in this matter hasn’t been compromised?”

He curls his lip, fidgets in the seat again. “Quite certain, sir. My job is to read people. And I read Jyn Erso loud and clear: she saw a purpose to go on fighting _with_ us, not against us, in the message that Saw showed her. Since then, she has seen a redemption of sorts for both her father and herself in that information. She’s furious with what happened to him — at what we did to him — but she will push to see his legacy overturned, and if the only way to do that is to get the plans to the planet killer and find proof of the weakness her father spoke of; well, then I believe that she will do that.”

His eyes blaze defiance at Draven, but his head is tilted down and away, so that the officer sees that the argument isn’t personal; it’s just painfully clear how wrong Draven is from where he’s sitting.

Draven surveys him. Taps a few keys on his datapad and grunts again. “It’s a pity Saw didn’t train her better, or she’d have swiped that holo-message and brought it off Jedha with you.”

Cassian shrugs. It’s not up to him to agree with Draven on that one, but he saw Jyn’s face back in that cave. He’d love a ringside seat on _that_ conversation, when Draven tries to accuse her of incompetence during the moments at which her whole galaxy turned upside down, and the floor began to literally fall out from under their feet on Jedha. When Cassian had asked her himself — practically pleaded with her to have retrieved the message — he’d seen her face and shoulders crumple in disappointment at herself. By now she’d have forged that disappointment into a jagged edged weapon, alternately sawing at herself with it, and lashing out with it at anyone who doubted her word.

“Well, thank you, Captain. The mission has evidently been … uh … more complex than anticipated. And for the most part, we’re pleased with how things have been handled. But don’t expect orders to go to Scarif after those plans any time soon; the council’s been in talks all day, since the first half of your crew got back from Eadu. Some of them won’t believe in the planet killer, whilst others don’t see any point in fighting it. It looks like the Empire’s superweapon is destroying the Alliance, whether it exists or not.”

Cassian stands and salutes. There’s a hopeless resignation in Draven’s voice that he’s never heard before. He pauses a second, trying not to show how angry he is. “It exists, sir. At Jedha, there was no doubt. Even if what we saw was the extent of its power, Jedha will be in atmospheric turmoil for decades. It’s already a planet-killer. And I’m confident that someone will get the Alliance to see that it can’t be ignored or outrun any longer.”

Now it’s Draven’s turn to shrug; “we’ll do what we can, Cassian, we always do,” he waves him away, eyes fixed on his datapad. His frown looks more uneasy than it had though, and that’s the most that Cassian can hope for at the moment.

The door to Draven's office opens with a hiss, and Cassian sees Jyn waiting outside it. Her shoulders are hunched as though she were in shackles, like when they’d first brought her to Yavin IV. Her mouth is in that thin, angry line again, and her eyes are big and dark.

He steps up close to her, into her personal space as she goes to pass him. With a glance and a nod, he hopes she sees him think _good luck_ at her. A moment of curiosity crosses her face when it’s closest to his, and he thinks she understands.

Whilst Draven debriefs Jyn, Cassian seeks out Melshi and the other Pathfinders who have been around a while. He’s got a few plans to make, just in case the council acts as the council is wont to act; just in case there should be a need to go to Scarif anyway.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Jyn deals poorly with responsibility.

When she looks up at him, her smirk is gentle, something almost shy, and full of gratitude. There’s a hint of fear in her shoulders, in the tension of her jaw, but her eyes sparkle with more warmth than he’s seen in them yet.

“I’m not used to people sticking around when things go bad.”

He moves towards her again, feeling his feet bring him into her orbit, drawn by the gravity in those deep eyes. “Welcome home,” he smiles back, and he wishes he could reach out his hand and give hers a squeeze.

The eyes of Melshi and the other Pathfinders burn into his back, but for a second there’s nothing in the galaxy but Jyn’s eyes, and he doesn’t even regret not correcting the _look_ Melshi had given him back on the transport off Eadu. He needs her to know that — along with everything he’s just said about finding a cause, fighting for a Rebellion that has a purpose, a _goal_ — he also wants to fight for her; beside her; to let her know that she doesn’t have to be alone in a vast galaxy of conflicting demands and selfish interests.

The long morning on Yavin IV is spent in surreptitious conversation over a datapad. Between Cassian’s access codes, Jyn’s light fingers and Kaytu’s sensitive aural array, they are able to obtain a copy of the Alliance’s intelligence files on Scarif without raising any suspicions in command, or leaving any records of their interest in the files. Bodhi, Chirrut and Baze sit with them, Bodhi occasionally laughing nervously and correcting some false assumption in the Rebels’ data. Baze nods approvingly as something like a plan starts to come together, and Chirrut is a comforting presence, smiling serenely at Jyn when she looks around to check the agreement of the small group.

Cassian lets her lead the planning, adding details only where he thinks his past experience is likely to outstrip hers (the number of times he’s impersonated Imperial personnel, for instance, and his understanding of Kaytu’s particular skillset). But it’s Jyn’s plan really. She divides the numbers of troops they’ll have, considers how best to create a distraction; at least as far as it’s possible to tell what might cause a distraction from the Rebels’ patchy descriptions of Scarif and Bodhi’s still-jumbled memories.

The role sits lightly on her, though there’s still an uneasy shift to her shoulders as she leans over the datapad, mulling over the scant information again.

“It seems like a solid plan to me,” Baze rumbles, and it’s the most praise any of them have heard from him in the last few days.

Bodhi shakes his head, peering over at the datapad in Jyn’s hands. “I’m just sorry I can’t remember more detail.” His eyes still have a haunted look, but the tension’s begun to lift around the edges of them. He’s starting to feel like he’s come to a home of sorts too.

Jyn smiles at him, a simple, reassuring smile that parts her lips just a fraction. “No Bodhi, you’ve been really helpful. When we get there, you’ll have the full landing cycle to jog your memories, and I know that you’ll get us down there without a hitch.”

The pilot inclines his head a little in gratitude, and Jyn gives his folded hands a quick squeeze. The touch is so easy, and it makes Bodhi smile back, nodding and looking down. “Sure, sure. I’ve done it hundreds of times, it’ll be fine.”

Chirrut adds his voice to the encouragement, leaning back to let his words rest on them all. “The Force will guide us. We have the Force of others on our side, and Jyn Erso’s _purpose_ leading us.” He throws a dazzling grin in the direction he knows Jyn to be in; her neck flushes as she blinks in astonishment.

Before she can try to bat away his words, Baze stands and drops a heavy hand on her shoulder. “I wouldn’t argue, little sister. He’s not followed anyone, not for _anything_ , since the destruction of our temple. But when he’s found something to follow, his path is clear and so is mine. We’ll be with you through all of this. For Jedha. For the Force.”

Jyn manages a bemused smile as she cranes her neck up at the towering, glowering giant of a man, and Baze grins back.

“But now, I am going to enjoy the _green_ of this planet, for it’s something that was lost from my home long ago.”

Chirrut stands too, and edges his way around the crates they’ve been sitting on as though they weren’t even there. He and Baze disappear off across the hangar, Baze’s rumbling voice and Chirrut’s merry, sing-song replies carrying over the crowds of pilots and engineers who constantly scurry to and fro.

Jyn finally glances at Cassian, and Bodhi’s gaze follows hers. “Do you think we’ve got enough here?” she asks.

“I think so,” he hopes his smile is even halfway as reassuring as Baze and Chirrut’s were. “I know I’ve been on missions worse prepared than this, and I trust the people on this mission to adapt to whatever Scarif can throw at us. We’ve got this, Jyn.”

Her lips curl up from one side of her mouth first, the movement travelling across her face. “No vibroblades in the back on this mission.”

“No,” his back seems to glow where the scar is again; where her fingers were; a reference to somewhere, sometime not so long ago that suddenly seems at once exposed and comfortingly private. “Not if you’re watching my back.”

Bodhi’s smirk is new to him as well, a rakish, toothy thing that takes over him as his look travels between Jyn’s face and Cassian’s. Cassian can see that before the bor gullet had left a wildness in his eyes, Bodhi Rook was probably the kind of pilot who could sell himself up to anyone in the Empire as a hot shot flyboy; could quietly, politely charm the pants off whoever, and get whatever he wanted.

“Oh,” Bodhi chuckles, gesturing briefly with fluttering fingers at the two of them. Like Jyn going into the debrief with Draven earlier, he still carries his wrists together, like he still feels Saw’s shackles on him. “Oh, okay,” the throaty snigger continues, rising up as Bodhi’s legs straighten and he stands. “I’ll um, I’ve got to see to some repairs in my flight suit. I’m gonna check out the transport. Make sure she’s sound after,” he exhales, stepping back from the circle of crates, eyes flicking between Jyn and Cassian. “After Eadu,” he finishes, raising his eyebrows and offering an open-palmed wave from his two hands, held before him as he turns away.

Cassian frowns at his retreating form, thinking of the look of betrayal in Bodhi’s eyes when Cassian had made Bodhi leave him alone with his sniper rifle trained on Galen Erso. After a lifetime successfully avoiding picking up waifs and strays; people to disappoint; he seems to have gained a disproportionate number of them over the last few days.

Yet in this instance, it’s Bodhi who’s found an excuse to leave, and Cassian quests around for the source of his disappointment. It’s a tangled thing, but the driving force soon reveals itself to be the intense, oppressive turn the atmosphere takes when he and Jyn are left alone. She’s like a breezy day on Mon Cala; the suns alternately striking bright light off high waves are soon eclipsed by dark scudding storm clouds. His own emotions swirl in her wake; if he stops to try and re-establish distance he feels like he’ll be dashed on a reef.

There’s a natural, easy charisma to her; she’s someone you _want_ to follow; but he’s only known her for a few engulfing days, and she’s spent so much of her time trying to cover her tracks, to put blocks in the way of anyone who might try to follow her, that in reaching out to her you’d be as likely to lose an arm in one of her trapdoors as to manage to connect with her.

She’s still frowning at Bodhi’s back, and he notes the nervousness in her shoulders, in her neck and jaw, has grown sharper.

“Don’t look at me like that,” she says, a warning growl underlying her voice. She’s not looking at him, still gazing across the hangar after Bodhi.

Cassian blinks, realises he’s been leaning forward, trying to come close to her even from the crate he’s sitting on a couple of feet from her. He’s feeling inclined to test those defences, probably because she’s so busily reinforcing them.

“Like what?”

Jyn’s jaw clenches. Her knuckles whiten on the datapad. She still doesn’t turn to him.

He’d like to reach out, take her jaw in his hand and turn her face gently towards him; to see what’s going on in those fathomless eyes. But if he did, he worries that she’d snap, or shatter. She sits so still and so stiffly. He wishes he knew how to find that casual touch she’d offered Bodhi; the gentle, unthinking warmth of her fingers on his hands. Their touches have not once had that ease: he’s been grabbing, dragging her from one place to another, through collapsing ceilings, collapsing floors, stormtrooper blasts. Or the hammock has pushed them aggressively against each other, their fingers only twining in a brief moment that they’d both tried to end.

She’s scared, and it shocks him a little. The responsibility of the mission is settling on her, and she’s taking it out on the most convenient target.

“Like … like you _admire_ something about me. Like you _respect_ me.”

“Why would it be so terrible if I did?” he asks as softly as he can.

“I don’t _need_ your admiration. I don’t need it,” she hisses.

She stands suddenly, coiling to step away, and he leaps up, snatching her wrist. As soon as his fingers touch her, she _moves_ , wriggles free too quick for him, and he’s close enough that her loose strands of hair brush his face as she turns her head to face him with a vicious snarl. She moves so fast the touch should feel like a whip across his face, but it’s a feather-gentle glide, a tickle along his skin.

He raises his hands, placatory, letting her know he won’t touch her again, but they’re still standing so close. Her breath is hot and furious, an irregular breeze on his neck. She smells of caf, and still has a hint of smoke and dust about her.

“What do you want from me?” She demands.

He pauses, trying to find a fixed point to focus on; but his emotions and thoughts are jumbled, roiling together like a sea in a storm. Like the atmosphere of Eadu, or the ground of Jedha as it rose up to mingle with the air.

“I don’t know.” The honesty is not easy, but it might be the only thing that will keep her from bolting at this point. “I’ve never wanted it before.”

The corner of her eye narrows and her lips whiten. “I know what it is. I’ve seen that look before. And I _don’t want it_.” She rolls her shoulders back, pushing her chest and chin up at him like she had on the U-wing when she’d confronted him about Galen. Her nose is so close to his, her eyes blazing like galaxies. “Do you know what happens to people who look at me like that?”

He can see it in her eyes. His mouth curls because he suddenly feels like he knows _her_. “You show them the time of their lives. You give them a glimpse of everything they’ve wanted to believe in, and then you dump them at the nearest spaceport, pockets picked clean of their illusions about you.”

She almost laughs, he can see the twitch on her face. But the aggressive mask holds. “Yeah. Right. Something like that.”

He takes a deep breath, swaying as close as he can. She’s infuriating. Intoxicating. “I have no illusions.”

Her smile is hard as durasteel, but she’s not moved away. “I beg to differ, Captain. You think this is anything more than a _temporary_ , _professional_ arrangement? You think I want to work with an assassin who’d target a vulnerable old man? To work with the Rebellion’s leashed dog at my side?”

“Yes. I think you’ve worked with people who’ve done worse.” _We’re not so different, not really,_ he wants to tell her.

She grips his jacket in two white-knuckled fists, and it takes all his willpower to keep his hands up and open, keep from automatically defending against the movement as she shoves space between them once more. It’s just a couple of inches that she’s shaken free by pushing him back, but she almost immediately closes them again with a fierce whisper. “You should be _begging_ my forgiveness.”

“I. don’t. have. to.” He repeats the words he’d said on Eadu after their last row.

“Well, I haven’t learnt anything new for the last few minutes, so I’m considering this planning session over.” Kaytu’s voice and sudden looming form jolt their glaring faces apart, and both look up at the droid.

Kaytu’s optical sensors rotate from Cassian’s face to Jyn’s and back again. “Cassian, would you like me to subdue her?”

“What? No!” his voice cracks incredulously. He realises that Jyn’s fists are still embedded in the fabric of his jacket.

“Bring it,” Jyn growls, leaning menacingly towards Kaytu, as unfazed by the droid’s extra two foot on her as she is by Cassian’s height. She tugs slightly at his lapels as she moves.

“No, Kaytu, please, just … go and help Bodhi fit out the ship. We’ll sort this out.”

Jyn now turns to gape at him.

Kaytu whirrs and examines both of them once more. “It’s your funeral, Cassian,” the droid says as resentfully as a droid can, and turns and lopes away from them.

Once Kaytu has gone, Cassian is reminded that they are in a dark corner of what is still a fairly busy hangar. The odd curious leer shoots their way from the Rebels who bustle around the space, whispers and elbow nudges spreading.

“What, precisely, is there to sort out?” Jyn interrupts his nervous examination of the room. At least no one will think they’ve been planning a secret mission to Scarif. They’ll just think that taciturn, jaded Cassian Andor, favourite of General Draven and spy without a personal life, has fallen head over heels for a semi-feral creature dragged in from Imperial jail a matter of days ago. He’s starting to worry that they may have a point.

“Let go,” he grumbles, finally taking her wrists again and shucking them free of his jacket — though not without some resistance from her.

Now that the bubble of emotion they’d been in has ruptured he feels the adrenaline begin to trickle away. He feels cold and exposed, and more than a little foolish for getting so angry about _her_. He thinks again of the easy touch she has with Bodhi, even with the others. But when the two of them come into contact it’s like burning; like dissolving together; like stepping out into a swamp or a cold lake. He can’t afford whatever this is, and he needs to regain some control.

“I’m getting a shower and some sleep before we go,” he tells Jyn, shrugging his jacket back into place and stepping around her, looking all the time at his boots.

She’s still watching him though, and also seems to have cooled down since Kaytu’s unexpected interjection. He gets a few paces away before he hears her call quietly.

“Cassian.”

Stars, he’s no idea if he can keep the burst of hope that flares in his chest from showing when he looks back.

She fidgets, but holds his eyes. Opens her mouth a couple of times as if trying to figure out what to say. Then she shrugs and tips her head brightly, trying to reset again to something lighter. “You mentioned a shower? I would give a million credits for a shower. I’ve no lodgings here. I’ve not had a shower in _months_.” The words tumble out rapidly, as though she’s trying to talk over herself.

If his disappointment shows, he’s too tired to mind. He gives a grunt of assent and gestures for her to follow.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I was struck by how much I love Bodhi in this, does it show? Sorry Bodhi, I'll maybe let Cassian explore some of that curiosity in a future fic...


	7. Chapter 7

“The ‘fresher’s through there. First shower’s yours.” The door to his dorm hisses shut behind her and she flinches, glancing back at it. He tells her the code again, letting her know she can leave whenever she wants.

He sees her examining the whole room as she stalks across his floor; there’s not much to take in. Some old caf mugs and glasses from the mess, that he’s forgotten to clean out and take back; a bunk; a desk with drawers for his clothes; a stack of old datapads and discs with briefings that have probably self-wiped after one read.

She pauses in the door to the ‘fresher and looks at him, taking him in as she has the rest of the room.

He sits on the bunk and meets her eyes, letting her study him. He’s tired of whatever keeps happening when they’re alone; of the sparring, the sneering, the one-upmanship. For once, he hopes that _everything_ shows in his eyes, rather than nothing.

Jyn is expressionless, face silhouetted by the glow from the ‘fresher behind her. After a moment, she turns and disappears into the other room, and soon afterwards he hears the sonic begin to thrum.

He nudges off his boots and stretches back on the bunk, enjoying the coolness of the sheets (even if it’s mostly caused by the incessant damp of the old stone building they’re in). He needs to find focus, but it’s oddly enough the most unnatural thing for him the night before a mission. The focus comes when he’s on his way, when he’s immersed in it. Beforehand, what he usually needs is a stiff drink, a half-decent holodisk or novel, or something else that will make him sleep.

He doesn’t notice the sound of the shower stop; the inner sides of his hands are pressed into his face, index fingers massaging the sides of his broken nose and eyes scrunched up, thumbs itching the stubble that’s working its way down his neck. He wonders whether he should shave for the mission to Scarif, huffs a sigh of amusement into his hands at the idea of neatening up for what’s probably going to be a suicide mission.

A slight shift in the air and the trace of something tickling his fingers makes him snap his eyes open; makes his back flinch up off the uneven mattress.

The silhouette above him retreats swiftly. He sees Jyn blink, as though she’s as surprised to find herself there as he is.

Before he can question it, she closes the distance again, hands pushing his shoulders back down as she comes to perch on the edge of the mattress. He might have imagined being the one to kiss away the hard, angry lines of her mouth, but now he finds there’s no need for it. Her lips are soft; a little chapped and frayed; but warm and much more yielding than they look.

And he knew she was strong, but the force of her grip on his shoulders makes him ache.

“What--?” he finally manages to whisper against her mouth, in a gap between the insistent, pressing forays of her tongue.

“What, ‘what’?” she echoes, her voice and expression sharp.

“What are you doing?”

“Stars, Captain, you said you’d no illusions but I know you’re not _that_ naïve.” That carefully constructed nonchalance again.

“Stop it,” he hisses, wrapping his hands around her biceps and pushing against her.

As she finally leans back, he catches a glimpse of the surprise on her face. It’s mixed with something — something almost like hurt?

“What _do_ you want?” The tone in her words makes it quite clear that she finds him just as maddening as he finds her. That’s something.

“I _told_ you, I don’t know,” he’s glad to hear that his voice doesn’t sound as petulant as it could do. He sighs. “Right now? A shower. And not to be the guy dumped at the spaceport before tomorrow’s mission.”

She finally releases his shoulders and sits up fully, running a hand over her face to sweep back the loose strands of her hair (did she even re-do it when she went to shower?).

“I’m not—“ she starts. Closes her eyes, seeking patience. She exhales a long and slow breath. Sucks it back in shakily when he reaches out for her hands, taking them softly in his own. “I don’t know either, okay? For the life of me I don’t know why, but I _wanted_ to do that. And I’m still going to need you around tomorrow. I don’t want to dump you at any spaceports — literally _or_ figuratively.” The words emerge slowly, in staccato, like they’ve been dragged from her. But she looks relieved when she’s finished, shoots him with another soft smirk, full of warmth. “And besides, that precise thing only happened the once. And I want to know where you get your information.”

He pushes up to his elbows, marvelling at her. Awkwardly makes it to a sitting position, letting her hands go reluctantly as he straightens, his gaze still locked on hers. “I have contacts everywhere,” he murmurs.

As he leans close to her, he can feel his pulse quicken; his scalp tickles with nerves, and he is subsumed by a wave of fear. He wants her too much, and he’s kriffing terrified of this awful need.

She doesn’t smell of smoke and ozone and death anymore, and it makes him acutely aware of the grime that still covers him. Almost relieved to have an excuse to defer this encounter, he pulls away from her and shuffles off the edge of the bed to stand.

She looks up at him, evidently unimpressed at the move.

“I still want that shower,” he shrugs.

The sonic shower could clean him fully-clothed; it’s designed for efficiency after all. But his clothes have been stiff and scratchy since Eadu, and sometimes the jaw-rattling feeling of the ultrasonics on his skin provides a welcome out-of-body experience.

By the time he feels like he’s shed his skin three times, the muck of Eadu, Jedha, and Force knows what else scathed from him, he’s settled into the acceptance that Jyn must have left his quarters by now. There’s a sort of hollowness that opens up from his throat to his navel at the thought that he’s thoroughly scuppered any opportunity there might have been there, but it’s better than the idea that she’d kissed him out of pity, or worse, some sort of obligation. And it might be better than disappointing himself, or her, by plunging headfirst into an experience that he feels so bitterly, inextricably invested in.

He leaves his clothes draped on a rail in the shower unit and shrugs on a robe that’s barely softer than they are. He’s stopped in his tracks as he emerges from the narrow doorway between the ‘fresher and the room.

She’s still there. Stretched out on her back, her boots kicked off and hands behind her head, knees swaying a little as she stares at the ceiling. She looks like she owns the place.

“Jyn?” he asks, stepping cautiously into his own room and folding his arms across his stomach, drawing the robe tight.

She draws a shaky breath and keeps her eyes fixed on the ceiling. “Don’t ask me why I’m still here,” she says. The words sound half-swallowed, as though she’s had to force them out.

“I wasn’t going to,” he murmurs, still moving forward. He stops by the edge of the bunk, gazing down at her.

He’d like to say that his inertia is the result of practicality. A sensible response to what would only be an emotional distraction when they’ve got an important job to do tomorrow. But he’s been _emotionally distracted_ since Jedha, really. Her truncheon, colliding with stormtrooper heads and joints, must have struck out and knocked something loose in him too.

Jyn’s eyes finally flicker from the ceiling to his face, and he sees a shadow of the expression she’d worn when he’d hoisted himself into the hammock, just before a moment when there had briefly been something like peace between them. But her expression hides a feeling that is coiled and desperate and hungry. She sits up and pivots off the bed, coming to stand close to him.

Her hands find his, still wrapped around himself protectively. Her fingers stroke the skin on the back of his knuckles, ghosting along his wrists and under the wide sleeves of the gown, tickling the hair on the backs of his arms. Looking into her eyes in the dim light of the small room is like glancing out of the cockpit when he lands on Yavin IV. There’s a whole jungle, full of life and noise and death and more, and it’s within her eyes.

She takes his wrists, her grip hard, and moves his arms away from where they’re folded. Simultaneously, she stretches up so that her lips meet his, and her hands slip inside the open robe, palms smoothing over the contours of his ribcage.

Cassian returns the kiss, but is frozen under her touch, pinned to the spot by doubts — her motivations, his own motivations, why he _needs_ certainty so badly here where he’s never had to worry about it before.

Jyn uses her grip on his back to pull herself closer, hands beginning an exploration of his shoulders, back, arse, the tops of his thighs, all tented beneath the robe. She’s not gentle, and he can feel her ragged fingernails trace sparks off him; one hand eventually settles so that her thumb can move back and forth over the vibroblade scar she’d noticed on Eadu.

She pulls back momentarily to examine his expression, and he knows that despite the burning, blossoming _yes_ inside him, his face has dropped into professional blankness.

This only seems to pique her though, and she kisses him again — _hard_ — jarring their teeth together. Her hands shift, shoving the cloth from his shoulders, one set of fingers coming to tangle in his hair, to pull his neck backwards as she catches his lower lip between her teeth, grazing them along it. Her belly presses up against his erection through her rough shirt as her other hand grabs his arse, folding him against her.

Finally, a small noise breaks free of the numb shell that has closed around his senses. It’s little more than a vibration that worms its way from his chest to his mouth, meeting Jyn’s own lips where they’re still on him. She gives a gasp of satisfaction though, her breath hot in his beard, and her hand goes low, she strokes her fingers upwards, once, and he thinks his knees might go from under him.

Then he feels her strength again, as she pivots, spinning him to land on the bed. She hops onto it after him, knees tucked together between his splayed legs, and her lips, teeth, tongue all toying with his nerve-endings as her mouth makes its way up his body, from a hip, across his chest, to his throat and finally back to his lips.

He feels like a drowning man, and his flailing hands grab fistfuls of bedding.

Like a wave playfully lapping the shore, she retreats again, tracing more lines down along his torso, back to his hip bones, nipping, sucking, and he’s finally, _finally_ jolted out of this astonished, fearful paralysis when her fully-clothed leg pushes his naked one aside; when the crystal necklace under her collar slips free and knocks coldly on his skin. He gasps, surfacing into a reality he’s struggling to admit he’s been wanting for days now.

Jyn pauses, meeting his eyes as he sits up; there’s a question and a challenge in her eyes, but also a hint of feral possessiveness.

His chest is heaving and curses escape his lips in a jumble of languages that make Jyn raise her eyebrows. She opens her mouth, a sardonic curve about to send him to his back again if he lets her; but she doesn’t get a word out before his mouth is on hers, his hands grasping her padded jacket, trying to restore some equality to this situation.

She shimmies her shoulders under his hands, helping him to work the heavy material off, grasping the hem of her shirt in tandem with him. Now they’re competing as to who can get her naked fastest, and Cassian finds himself petulantly slapping her fingers aside — this is something _he_ wants to do.

It doesn’t deter Jyn though, who’s already unfastened her pants before he can get to them. He grapples with her wrists, her waist, trying to hold her still a second so he can pivot on a knee, get the other one around her side — and finally he’s got her on her back. Her hair hasn’t fully come loose, but it’s splayed around her head on his crumpled sheets, and her grin is wild and full of something that makes him pause.

His frown smooths and his fingers relax their grip on the waistline of her pants momentarily. _Happiness_. That’s a new one. He wonders how many different smiles he can discover before the deadline is up, before rendezvous, and flight, and fight after fight after whatever else happens on the mission.

With renewed determination, he drags her pants from her, fingers catching her underwear and taking it too. He kneels by the bed, relishing the contrast of the hard, damp stone under his knees with the silky, soft warmth of Jyn’s legs. He brushes his face along the sensitive skin inside her thighs, teasing her with his breath, his beard, his lips, tongue, a graze of teeth.

She bucks her hips up into his mouth and winds furious fingers in his hair. The sparks of pain that shoot into his scalp send sparks of something almost entirely opposite darting down his body.

Jyn doesn’t shout or scream, but that’s not to say she’s unresponsive. She hisses and gasps, and he can feel the earthquakes of her moans tremble in the skin at her belly as he rubs his thumbs over it. When she comes, he holds her body as it arches; the scraps of her fingernails dig into his head and the noise she makes she mostly swallows down, but a whimper and a curse escape her lips.

Cassian glances up at the sight, still moving his tongue gently over her to keep her shivering. There’s a light sheen of sweat on her skin, which seems to glow in the gloomy room. Her lips are a dark, sweeping hill on the contours of her face, and tendrils of her hair clutch at her neck and chin.

He waits for her to return to him, teasing her skin as he does, tracing the path she took earlier on his own flesh. He finds his way around the architecture of her body with his mouth; breathing fluttering kisses over the raised skin of scars that had been hidden under her vest back on the U-wing; nipping the swell of her breasts; settling his hands where his mouth has already travelled.

She’s back with him when her grip in his hair tightens again, when her belly creases as she sits up, and she shifts her hips so that her wetness presses against his skin. She guides his face to hers with her hold and her kiss is fierce, almost — grateful? It lights him up, and he runs his hands gently over her back and arms.

Jyn coaxes him further onto the narrow cot, shuffling back so that she has the space to fold him away from her, pressing him back into the hard mattress. The coldness of the space that opens up between them momentarily makes Cassian shiver, but she’s following him closely, lips on his neck; his collarbone; teeth on his earlobe; through his beard. She lets her breasts press against his chest, that necklace that she never takes off dangling between them as she settles back, her mouth returning to remind him of the ache of his own unfulfilled want.

Her touch is languid; she sends the world into a glassy haze, where her mouth on him is the only thing that seems real. He tries to reach her when a particularly piercing bolt of pleasure rolls over him, hands shaking, stroking the sides of her face, feeling her jaw move beneath his fingers, letting himself be lulled by the sound of her deep breaths. He’s enveloped by tides of sensation, and Jyn is the moon that controls them.

His hips start to buck under her, and she firmly presses them down, raising her head with a smirk that nearly stops his heart.

Before the questioning whine can escape his lips she’s on top of him, teasing with her touch before she slides onto him. His own eyes close briefly, but he forces them open, searches her face greedily, trying to take in every detail and keep it burned into his mind: the softness around her dark lashes, the shine of her cheekbones and lips and the pink flushes that patch her skin. Her hair hangs onto the bun she wears only nominally; it’s become a loose tangle that reaches her neck, coiling, curling around her face and shoulders.

He grasps her thighs, raising white imprints on her skin with his clasp as she rides him; gently at first, but with increasing pressure, starting to raise a noise from their skin when it meets.

Cassian’s shoulder blades dig into the mattress as his back arcs; every muscle sings with heat, with the velocity of the feeling that’s overtaking him.

“Don’t you dare,” Jyn grunts, her fingers digging into his arms, but he’s already there, and she grinds hard against him, not one to be left behind. He thinks he hears his name on her lips.

There are white spots in his vision when he becomes aware of his breath again, of the cooling sweat on his skin. She’s breathing heavily too, leaning over him, propped up on one arm whilst the other still holds his forearm. It’s a gentle touch on him now though, and he frees his hands from her legs, sweeping them up her sides and back and bringing her down to him.

There’s a momentary resistance in her locked out arm; her eyes are dark when they flicker over him, but then she relents and tucks her body close to him, shifting her hips and releasing him as she does.  She stretches out by his side, pressing the length of her body against him.

Jyn’s head curls comfortably under his chin, and he strokes the curve of her back absent-mindedly, fingers swirling over her vertebrae and the odd ridge of scar tissue. He can’t help a bemused smile at the knot of it that his fingers find between her ribs.

“A close miss,” he murmurs.

Jyn snorts, and the feeling of her movement against his chest is delicious. “Yeah. Luckily the dozy git had already broken his blade on my truncheon. It wasn’t deep.”

He hums agreement, his arms wrapped about her and a dizzyingly comfortable feeling settling over him. There’s a tension, an uncertainty in her shoulders at first, but bit by bit, breath by breath, she uncoils.

“This is silly, you know?” she says to his throat.

“What?”

“This. If you get all distracted on Scarif I don’t want to be the cause of someone else’s death because you do something stupid.”

She’s trying to sound flippant, but her fingers press into the skin of his shoulder.

“I won’t, Jyn.”

She’s silent for a minute, but her breathing is quick. “So you’ll leave me if necessary? I mean, you didn’t on Jedha. Or Eadu,” her voice grows small on the last words.

Cassian works his jaw, contemplating how to untangle the question. He’s sure there’s a mine hidden in it somewhere. “No. I’ll be with you every step. So will Kay. We’ll get those plans, together.”

“And the others?”

“They’ll do their job. Jyn, you don’t have to find the reasons for them all to be there.”

Her cheek strokes his shoulder as she nods.

“Jyn,” he falters, frowning at the question that’s bubbled up to the surface of his mind as it tries to wake up to the reality that their mission starts all too soon. “Do you forgive me?”

She lets out a huff of air on his neck; he thinks he can feel her frown echo his. “Does it matter if I do?”

The silence stretches, both listening to each other’s breath, trying to assess where to go next.

“No,” he eventually admits. “I suppose it doesn’t. Your father died anyway.”

She presses her face to him and tries to inch closer, her arm wrapped around his torso. “You tried, though. And you got me out of there. I might forgive you yet,” she smiles up at him, another new thing, this one searching, _hoping_.

His lip quirks up in reply. “We’ll see, then.”


	8. Chapter 8

“Cargo shuttle SW-0608?”

Jyn and Bodhi hold their breaths; Cassian pauses on the ladder to the cockpit, and Kaytu surveys them all.

“You are cleared for entry.”

He drops to the deck with the same nervous release of breath shared by the others — bar the silent droid. Jyn releases the crystal held between her fingers, and he glances at it as a memory resurges: her body taut above his, her hair tangled around her and the crystal the only thing she wears. It glows dully in the light from Scarif, and he thinks it’s not as radiant as she herself is.

She’s grinning, a toothy, taut thing full of determination. But a flash of something familiar reaches him from her eyes; he’s close to her in the tight space.

Jyn reaches out and squeezes his arm. It’s that same unthinking ease of touch that he’d longed for after their return from Eadu, and it wrenches a smile from him in return that he hopes Kay can’t analyse.

She brushes past him, but the warmth of her touch lingers; seems to linger throughout the whole descent and landing; fuels his speech to the troops on board and infuses his instructions with an urgent, unthinking passion that he realises he’d grown entirely unfamiliar with until recently. “Make ten men feel like a hundred.” It works: the Pathfinders roar, and everyone moves to their position with an eagerness, a _hope_ that none of them should really be feeling at this moment.

 

…

 

It’s probably what keeps him conscious when his descent from the tower of datatapes is finally arrested by the sharp durasteel grille of an access platform.

He doesn’t know how far he’s fallen; he does know that no one fell after him. She’s still up there, still going, up amongst the winking red and white lights above, amongst the stars.

Cassian tries to force himself to focus, but his mind feels like it’s still falling. He feels sick, or elated, or terrified, and his body is shaking uncontrollably. The pain is a white cocoon, a sheet that keeps threatening to wrap itself around him, to tip him from _bright_ , _searing_ , _white_ into _quiet_ , _peaceful_ , _black_ ; the temptation that’s tugging at the edge of his mind.

But as he tries to escape the sound of his own ragged breathing, gagging at the taste of iron that accompanies the cold air of the archives, he manages to bring his thoughts to her. He imagines Jyn’s fingers on his arm, her touch comfortable, familiar and something he can follow until she tells him not to. Gradually, it dawns on him that the upper part of his left arm doesn’t sear with pain like so much else. He clings to the idea it represents, moving it experimentally.

Too far, and it meets with fire in his back; he flinches and the torment moves to his leg. Gasping and blinking, he makes himself move through it, although his vision comes and goes and he dry-heaves as his imagination tries to tell him that he’s about to step over the edge of the grille, to plummet once more.

The cold of a durasteel railing helps him steady himself, his shivering, unsteady form rising to some parody of standing upright.

He’s made it to the turbolift access panel, thumps his fist on it — miraculously, his blaster is still gripped in his right hand — and he’s not even considered what he’ll do if there are troopers in the lift.

But it’s empty, and as he stumbles into its open doors, he sees a distorted reflection in the polished plast of its surfaces. He sways on the spot for a moment, hunched in surprise; he’d not even noticed the blaster wound in his side until now.

Jyn’s grip on his arm redoubles though, and he staggers his leg forward far enough to reach the floor controls. He hammers on the uppermost level, maybe he shouts at the machine to close its doors, move faster, but maybe that’s just what he wants his broken form to do.

He doesn’t let himself lean on the side of the small compartment, fearful that relaxing will encourage the blackness that’s lurking somewhere behind him. Instead he cringes, raising his right hand, blaster and all, to press to his left arm, trying to think of her touch, her myriad smiles, her eyes with all the paths in them that he wants to explore.

The doors open onto the bright, hot light of Scarif and Cassian doesn’t hesitate for a second when he sees the white-uniformed back of Krennic before him.

As the imperial’s body drops, Cassian’s shot smouldering in his back, Jyn’s dusty, wind-swept face comes into view. Her eyes are bright and fierce, and her smile is twisted, furious, overjoyed, _proud_. She leaps for a control panel, and Cassian sees her limp, one leg struggling to follow the rest of her momentum. He leans on a column by Krennic’s body, thinking about how he’s that leg; he’ll keep following her until she tells him not to.

She does _something_ , turns slowly, her shoulders relaxing as she does. Her smile is like a gut punch on top of all his other injuries, but he keeps standing for her sake.

Jyn limps to his side, and that familiarity of touch that he’d craved, and followed, and _needed_ is there again, her arms shaking to match him as she envelops his waist. Everything around him is too loud, or too quiet; there’s too much going on for his ravaged senses. So he breathes her in, holds her close and tries to think only of now, of Jyn, of the fact that they’ve done what they came here to do, and that it’ll have to be enough. It’ll all have to be enough.

\--

_There is a man that I know,_

_seventeen years, he never spoke._

_Guessed he had nothing to say,_

_he opened his mouth on Judgement Day._

_I listened with all of my might,_

_but was scared by the look in his eyes._

_Like he'd already lost the fight,_

_and there was no hope ever in sight._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm sorry! I was going to leave it before the attack on Scarif, but then Cassian's pain called to me, because I'm awful. Sorry Cassian.  
> I'm not sure if they're kinda OOC here and there, bits of this were super quick to write and others weren't, but (gentle) feedback is appreciated - this fandom has some *amazing* writers and it's a bit daunting when the only fic I've written for years is for comparatively teeny tiny fandoms. Also someone else gave me the idea of Cassian having a brother, though when I wrote that bit I was convinced it had been on Wookieepedia. And yeah, until we're told otherwise, I'm keeping Snowoks in the canon info on Fest.  
> Title and lyrics at the beginning and end are from the Laura Marling song Hope in the Air.
> 
> Really, I do intend to write some happy Everyone lives/no one dies some time. Probably. Maybe.

**Author's Note:**

> Dialogue in their confrontation is all from the Alexander Freed novelisation; I think one of my favourite aspects of it is how worried Cassian is about what Jyn will do to him when she figures out his mission to kill Galen. But this scene is Jyn POV in the novel so it was fun to switch it round. And from there, Cassian didn't want to let go of the story :)
> 
> (i.e. I identify with Cassian, because I, too, think the universe of Jyn Erso...)


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